There's no place like Hollywood for gossip and scandal. To folks watching Entertainment Tonight and reading People, it may seem that we are in a heyday of scandalous ladies who garner all the headlines with their escapades.
But the golden age of Hollywood and before resulted in myriad tawdry episodes that would give Paris Hilton or Britney Spears a serious run for their collective money.
The silent era, pre-Hays office censorship, even had these ladies acting up on-screen.
Theda Bara, the original Vamp, wore see-through clothes and oozed carnal sexuality. Shocking - but oh, so titillating! Despite her humble (and far less tantalizing)
beginning as Theodosia Goodman, born in Cincinnati, OH, she reigned on the silent, silver screen as the man-eater and sexual predator of her time. She enhanced her publicity-created image by affecting a mysterious, foreign-sounding accent and wearing veils and odd clothes that heightened her "otherness". In the end, she gave name to the sort of erotic, Gothic woman who was forever named, "vamp".Another siren of the silent era was Clara Bow - the "It Girl", a title gleaned from
her performance in her second major hit, "It", which followed "Mantrap" in 1926 - the film that put her on the map after several other films, and which garnered such comments as "Clara Bow! And 
how!". Despite an ethereal beauty, once transformed into her screen persona, she oozed sex appeal and embodied the flapper ideal. Like so many Hollywood legends, however, her origins as a child of a schizophrenic mother and sexually abusive father, in a Brooklyn tenement took their toll on her. At the age of 26, in 1933, her career was over after suffering the condemnation of Hollywood for her personal life which was falsely deemed immoral. Budd Schulberg said of her, "Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low-life and a disgrace to the community.". Disgraced by what Hollywood had made of her, she faded from the scene, along with her films.Beautiful, blonde, Thelma Todd,
despite her appearance in over 40 films in a career that spanned nearly 10 years, including the Marx Brothers 
comedies, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, is unfortunately known best for her death. The "Ice-cream Blonde" was found dead on the morning of December 16, 1935, in her car in the gargage, the cause ruled asphyxiation by carbon monoxide poisoning. Even though the police's ruling was suicide, numerous other theories surfaced. Despite her active social life, she was unlucky in love, and a fight with her ex-husband, Pat DeCicco at a party the night before cast him in a suspicious light. Further, that actions taken by her possessive on-again/off-again lover, Roland West, may have contributed to her death were postulated as well. Even more ominous was the idea that her death may have been the result of her refusal to allow gambling at a club 
she owned, thus pitting her against the notorious Lucky Luciano. Aided and abetted by a grand jury investigation into her death that was unable to gather sufficient evidence of a crime, Todd's death became first example of a "conspiracy theory" - and her mysterious death guaranteed Todd posthumous notoriety for decades to come.And one of Hollywood's most enduring infamous ladies is the legendary Lana Turner. As if her performances in such steamy classics as "The Postman Always Rings Twice" opposite the hunky Alpha-male, John Garfield, were not enough, her place in the annals of Hollywood history was assured by the truth-is-stranger-than fiction drama of her real life.
Born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner (a name that certainly makes the Hollywood appelation she became famous with understandable) in Wallace, Idaho, she became the stuff of Hollywood lore when she was (it was claimed) discovered at Schwab's soda fountain. In fact, W. R. Wilkerson, the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter made the fateful discovery of the Hollywood sex symbol at The Top Hat Cafe, across from Hollywood High. "The Sweater Girl", one of the most famous of pinups, already had violence in her past. Her father, a miner and gambler, was robbed and murdered on his way home from a card game.
Along with fame came 7 marriages, including a tempestuous one with band leader Artie Shaw, as well as numerous romances, her lovers including Tyrone Power who, Turner claimed in her autobiography, was the love of her life. And it was an affair of the heart that led to the
ultimate scandal that would forever haunt Turner.Lana Turner inherited an Rh blood disorder from her Mother (no doubt an Rh negative blood type, which often leads to death in the second and third child after the mother's body creates antibodies against Rh positive blood). Her single child, daughter Cheryl, was saved only with a complete blood transfusion at birth. And Cheryl's ddramatic entrance into the world may have been the harbinger of tougher times to come for the mother and daughter.
Johnny Stompanato, Turner's tempestous lover, and a gangster with numerous ties to the underworld, was stabbed to death by 14 year old Cheryl in 1958, ostensibly defending her mother from the brutal man's physical abuse.
That Stompanato was abusive was well-documented, as he had taken a beating from a young Sean Connery when Stompanato decided Turner and Connery were having an affair on the set of their film, Another Time, Another Place. In the end, the courts agreed, and Cheryl's claim of defending her mother was accepted - the verdict: justifiable homicide.Despite a career with critically acclaimed performances, including the classic three-hanky tear-jerker, Imitation of Life, which followed Stompanato's death, Lana's career soon trailed off and her last years saw such infrequent appearances as on 1983's Falcon Crest. The Academy Award nominated actress, WWII pin-up queen and namesake of the B-17 bomber, Tempest Turner, daughter of a murder victim, mother of a daughter who killed to protect her, and screen siren extraordinaire in such films as Madam X, The Bad and the Beautiful and Peyton Place, died of throat cancer in 1995.
The curse of the 13-letter Hollywoodland sign, from which starlet Peg Entwhistle jumped to her death, clearly remains a ghostly memory despite the removal of the "land" letters to ease the superstitious minds.
